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RE: questions about accessible pdfs

for

From: julian.rickards@ndm.gov.on.ca
Date: Mar 2, 2004 7:12AM

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Joe Clark
>
> (Word2K is trickiest, since you must
> use certain defined styles and add alt texts yourself.)

Minor point, Word 2000 *and more recent*. Unfortunately, WordPerfect
(although far behind in the office suite competition) cannot create
accessible PDFs even though it does have a built in save to PDF option. At
an Adobe workshop in October 2002, an Adobe representative told us that they
wanted to work with Corel to enable WordPerfect to create Accessible PDFs
but apparently their offer was turned away because "CorelDRAW competes with
Illustrator".

I use Word 2002 every week to create PDFs and it is not the styles that are
the issue but the document structure. For example, as long as I choose
Heading 1 for the primary heading of the document, it doesn't matter what
the font, colour, point size, alignment or borders may be, PDFMaker (the
macro that sends the document structure to Acrobat) tags the block with
Heading 1.

Therefore, just as document structure is important in HTML documents,
document structure also is important in Word documents that are to be
converted to accessible PDFs.

---------------------------------------------------------
Julian Rickards
Digital Publications Distribution Coordinator
Publications Services Section
Ontario Ministry of Northern Development and Mines
Phone: (705) 670-5608
Fax: (705) 670-5690



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